Tag: Meditation

I decided to complete an entire lap of the planet and have headed west to LA by train.
35 hrs.
2 nights in a sleeper car.
Strange happenings.

But first…

Parade Day

After the Royals won their first title in 30 years the city put on the mother of all victory parades.
I’ve never seen so much blue.
The KC metro area has a population of around 2,000,000 people.
It is estimated that 800,000 filled the city for the motorcade and victory rally.
There were 4 arrests.
Most of the area public schools closed for the day.
They had little choice…more than 400 teachers put in for leave.

Remember, remember, the 5th of November

The 5th of Nov this year made up 24 of the 35 hr train journey from KC to LA. After an amazing night’s sleep, watching the sky roll by as we crossed the plains of Missouri and Kansas, breakfast was served around the time that we ventured into Colorado.

The beauty of the dining car is that you never know who you will be seated with. My companions that morning were 2 middle aged women.
They were both heading to Albuquerque.
That is where the similarities ended.

F1 was from Ohio, a buddhist and meditation teacher of 20+ years
F2 was from parts unknown, opinionated, angry and hated everything that you ever did, said, or thought of doing or saying.

Her mouth would smile, but her eyes were full of nothing but contempt.
In the short time that we were together, she expressed her disdain for:

F1 excused herself first.
I asked F2 what she was going to do with her morning.

“I’m going to read and meditate to try and get over her (i.e. F1)…”
(Pause)
“…and you for that matter.”
I wished her the best for the exercise.
“Oh, I WILL be successful”, was her reply.

I know it takes all kinds…but does she really need to be one of them?

East Bumfuk, NM

Later that morning, somewhere in New Mexico (middle of nowhere) we made an unscheduled stop.
The train had hit a herd of deer.
After a quick check the engine was judged OK to continue.
Bambi was not.
They won’t be making a sequel to that movie anytime soon.
(Sorry kiddies)

Other notables

I had lunch with a group of Amish from Indiana.
They were getting off in Flagstaff (AZ) before catching a bus down to Phoenix for business. One couple is planning to take a cruise from the US to Australia and NZ.
They asked me about kangaroos.

And then there was Amtrak Tom.
Tom was the conductor responsible for my sleeper car.
Tom is large and loud.
Tom told me about his 8,000 slide ViewMaster collection.
I didn’t notice his ring finger, but I’m guessing that Tom is not married.
Tom is too much of a ladies man to be tied down.

(Hands up all those old enough to remember ViewMaster. All those with hands down…ask Google.)

In LA now.
Home on Monday.

Manhattan Beach, CA – “There’s never a mankini around when you need one!”

It is just over 2 years since I resigned from my last corporate job and 21 months since I had a regular pay check. Whilst life is far from perfect, it is infinitely better than it was when I was a slave to the machine. There is literally nothing that I miss about that old life. After enjoying some travel in the first few months post escape, life has settled into a pleasant rhythm. I feel both happier and more comfortable with who I am than at any stage in my life.

Why?

I have been reflecting on this question for the past few weeks. Here is some of what I’ve come up with:

I have time for the things and people that are important to me. Before it was a case of spending most of my time doing what was important to other people and then hoping to pull together enough time-scraps in order to have an actual life.

I’ve learnt more in the past year-and-a-half than I did in 15 years working in the financial services industry. After dabbling in yoga and meditation for the previous decade, at the start of last year I made a commitment to devote energy towards making it a permanent part of my routine. This has proven to be the single best decision that I’ve made for myself…ever.

I spend my days working on projects and involved with people that are both interesting and matter to me. All this takes place in an environment where I am made to feel appreciated for who I am and not measured by how much money I can generate for somebody else.

…and to think that all this only took me 40 years to find. I wonder what I’m going to learn in the next 40?

Like this:

The text that follows was originally published by Jawad S. Mian at Stray Reflections.

Over the summer, Science magazine published an instructive report that spoke to the challenges of the disengaged mind. We quote from the editor’s summary:

Nowadays, we enjoy any number of inexpensive and readily accessible stimuli, be they books, videos, or social media. We need never be alone, with no one to talk to and nothing to do. Wilson et al. explored the state of being alone with one’s thoughts and found that it appears to be an unpleasant experience. In eleven studies, they found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more, and that many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts. Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.

How strange. Perhaps the French philosopher Blaise Pascal was correct in observing that “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries, and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” Life is difficult for many of us, but very often we make it even more difficult for ourselves by the way we think. In our age of connectedness and perpetual motion, there is something to be said for cultivating stillness in order to summon some emotional and mental clarity. We suspect that most of man’s problems arise from his abandoning the religion of solitude. Pico Iyer, in The Art of Stillness, reveals the unexpected pleasures of sitting still, without being distracted, as a way to uncover a form of well-being that is inherent to the nature of our minds.

He reflects with a sense of nostalgia:

Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize…. We’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off—our holy days, as some would have it; our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.

Iyer believes that this is the reason why many people seem to be turning to yoga or meditation or tai chi. They are all desperate to unplug.

How many times have we imagined sitting on the banks of a river in perfect tranquility or leaving everything behind and retreating to the top of a mountain to live an unperturbed life?

From time to time, we all feel overwhelmed by the demands of this world and would like nothing more than to withdraw into a more peaceful state. But harmony often eludes the untutored mind.

Much has been written about meditation as the solution for the modern man or woman, given his or her frantic schedule. According to popular blogger Maria Popova:

Over the centuries, the ancient Eastern practice has had a variety of exports and permutations in the West, but at no point has it been more vital to our sanity and psychoemotional survival than amidst our current epidemic of hurrying and cult of productivity. It is remarkable how much we, as a culture, invest in the fitness of the body and how little, by and large, in the fitness of the spirit and the psyche—which is essentially what meditation provides.

Research has shown this can lead to better health and clearer thinking, even emotional intelligence. And if you’re Ray Dalio, it can even lead to bigger profits. As acknowledged by the founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, “Meditation, more than any other factor, has been the reason for what success I’ve had.”

We find all cultures of the world steeped in esoteric practices of one form or another to provide an effective means for acquiring self-knowledge. A kind of introspection and detached observation that helps people discover an even higher aspect of themselves. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is contemplative prayer. In the far Eastern traditions, vehicles of meditation often have to do with mastering aspects of breathing or the heartbeat. In the Zen Buddhist tradition, it is sitting with an awareness of thoughts and feelings without clinging to them. In Islamic tradition, it is emptying your heart and invoking God’s name. The objective of these practices is not to force yourself into a state of peace – which would be counterintuitive – but instead, to refocus your attention away from the ego or intellect toward the calm, pristine depths within. To attain harmony, one has to seek that lilt which is present in the innermost core of our being. Acco rding to Inayat Khan, “It is just like the sea: the surface of the sea is ever moving, yet the depth of the sea is still. And so it is with our life. If our life is thrown into the sea of activity, it is on the surface. We still live in the profound depths that are still, in that peace. But the key is to become conscious of that peace which can be found within ourselves.” As the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius shared in one of his Meditations, nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul. You need not sail to St. Barts or travel to the Himalayas.

Meditation, in the words of Inayat Khan, is not some stoic physical position or arduous mental exercise that you do for 20 minutes a day. It is really a letting go, the lifting of a veil, in our view, which leads to a marvelous change of viewpoint. By awakening our self, we develop more attentive and appreciative eyes that are so essential for a true reflection of the world.